Urban Robo-Rally

For a cool $2 million, any human driver would obey traffic laws, merge correctly, stay in their lane, and avoid a crash at a busy intersection. But a robot? Well, that's a different story. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), announced plans yesterday to hold its third Grand Challenge competition on November 3, 2007, giving autonomous ground vehicles the chance to simulate military supply missions on a 60-mile course in a mock city—in fewer than six hours.

More From Popular Mechanics

The grand plan behind the Grand Challenge is to foster research that will lead to fully autonomous, battlefied-ready vehicles within the next decade. After the success of last year's event, won by "Stanley," the Stanford-backed, Pentium-packed Volkswagen Touareg that took top honors, driving nearly 132 off-road miles in just under 7 hours, next year's race pits the 'bots against manned and unmanned city traffic—and a heckuva lot of traffic lights. Teams can qualify by either submitting a proposal for up to $1 million in technology development funds or—similar to least year—beating the competition in a series of qualification rounds. —Andrew Nusca